Interrelación entre gestos y vocalizaciones en funciones comunicativas tempranas: Evidencias desde la lengua vasca

Abstract

The aim of this longitudinal study is to explore the combinational patterns of gesture and speech from the babbling period to the reduplicative varied babbling and also the temporal alignment between the two modalities. The corpus of the analysis has been built taken into account two Basque at age 9 months and 13 months being Basque their mother tongue. The analysis has focused on the gesture and vocal production of a total of 1.260 communicative acts extracted from approximately 6hrs of in-home made recording. The extracted data shows that (1) since reduplicative babbling is left behind, the varied babbling pre-linguistic period basically starts to be produced in combination with oral production rather than just as a gesture act; (2) in these early gesture-speech combinations most of the gestures are deictic gestures (pointing and reaching gestures) with a main declarative communicative purpose; (3) when in the period of proto-conversational babbling the first combinations of gesture and speech are produced, which means that there are evidences of a temporal coordination pattern between the two mentioned modalities which consists on synchronizing the first deictic gesture beat with the beginning of oral production. These results support the hypothesis that babbling children temporarily coordinate gesture-speech combination since the period of varied or conversational babbling.